Faculty of 1000 and VIVO: Invisible Colleges and Team Science

Within the traditional model of scholarly communications, invisible colleges facilitate a process of social diffusion that fuels the growth of scientific specialties. This diffusion of ideas operates not through published journal articles but rather through informal communications between researchers. In recent years, researchers have availed themselves of collaborative Web 2.0 forums such as blogs, wikis, and social networking sites to meet their need for increasingly sophisticated vehicles of informal communication. Examinations of the database Faculty of 1000 and the semantic web application VIVO help to illustrate how invisible colleges have migrated to a networked environment where they can play an even stronger role within scholarly communications. This paper will argue that the enhanced social diffusion enabled by such collaborative online venues offers an opportunity for researchers globally to accelerate the pace of innovation in an increasingly open era of team science